Words Seem Out Of Place

Twenty years ago this week, Pearl Jam released No Code . This raises two questions in my mind. First, where the hell did those two decades of my life go? Second, has the album held up all these years later? To the first question I can only shake my head in disbelief and mutter to myself. To the second, I can answer unequivocally that yes,  No Code does indeed hold up. In fact, it's an album that's only improved with both age and some distance from the preconceptions of critics and fans back in 1996. Songs like "Sometimes," "Hail Hail," "Off He Goes," and "Present Tense" are near-perfect examples of what the band does best: heartfelt sincerity laced with a strong does of caustic world-wariness. Other tracks like "Smile" and "Red Mosquito" remind us what ramshackle fun their music can be. And the lead single and polyrhythmic tour-de-force "Who You Are" simply baffled listeners—it sounded unlike anything th...

When I started this blog, I didn't intend to spend much time looking backwards at myself . I didn't think that appealed to me, with so much happening so fast right now, like the twins growing into little people before our eyes. Plus its not always easy looking at your younger self. Like Patti Smith said, " I haven't fucked much with the past, but I've fucked plenty with the future." But then l ast time in this space, I wrote a little about my bookstore days and briefly mentioned the catering job I took after that. That opened the door to revisit that time in my life so I tentatively followed the trail of memories a while longer. I thought back to what I was doing then; who I was. Keep in mind I hadn't thought much about most of this in a very long time, so I suppose what I'm recounting might be slightly altered from what really happened, due to time playing tricks with my memory. But in thinking about some of this stuff for the first time in ages, I...